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  3. The government has launched its consultation on better measures of child poverty, but it really has to be asked, better for whom

The government has launched its consultation on better measures of child poverty, but it really has to be asked, better for whom

admin2015-09-26  35
问题     The government has launched its consultation on better measures of child poverty, but it really has to be asked, better for whom? This is a government that looks set to preside over a truly dramatic increase in child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies projects that after a decade of steady reductions in child poverty rates, 300,000 more children will be living in poverty in the U. K. by 2015. Big cuts to tax credits, a three-year freeze in child benefit, uprating out-of-work benefits using CPI rather than the more generous RPI—all will make vulnerable families poor over the course of this parliament.
    So what does the government do about it? Rather than review its policies and ask how it can seek to fulfill its legal commitments under the Child Poverty Act 2010, it launches a consultation on the way that child poverty is measured.
    Poverty is a complex phenomenon and no single indicator can fully capture the condition. The CPA 2010 recognizes this, urging governments to make progress against four specific measures; relative poverty, absolute poverty, material deprivation and persistent poverty. Alongside this, we also track numerous other indicators of child well-being in the U. K. such as educational achievement, health outcomes and subjective experience.
    Both lain Duncan Smith and David Laws sought to convince the audience at the launch of the consultation that the government was not in retreat from the income measures contained in the CPA 2010. But in truth, the consultation document is peppered with digs at the relative measure, suggesting that changes to this indicator do not tell us anything meaningful about "real" poverty.
    The consultation also seeks to dilute the relevance of income by developing a "multidimensional indicator" of child poverty. This indicator will blend together measures of worklessness, unmanageable debt and family stability among others to produce a single headline number that can be tracked over time.
    At best, the government is combining poverty with its many consequences. At worst, it is simply changing the yardstick against which they will be measured.
    Consider, for example, the proposal that parental worklessness be a key defining feature of the new child poverty measure. Using current definitions, 60% of children living in poverty today have at least one parent in work. Any measure that insists poverty is about worklessness will simply airbrush these 1.4 million children out of the picture altogether.
    Equally worryingly, the consultation insists that any new poverty measure must resonate with the public. The latest British Social Attitudes survey shows just how widespread negative views of vulnerable groups in society are, but also makes clear that much of this shift in public opinion has been caused by current and previous government policies.
    So, should we expect better measures of child poverty as a result of the consultation? Not better for the children growing up in low-income families for sure. And given the broader costs to society of child poverty, not better for anyone else—except, perhaps, a government that we suspect may be trying to avoid being held to account.
The passage is mainly about______.
选项 A、poor children in the world
B、the multidimensional indicator of child poverty
C、the consultation on child poverty yardstick
D、government policies on child poverty
答案C
解析 主旨题。文章开篇提到政府就贫困儿童更好的衡量标准进行了磋商，然后谈论了磋商的内容和目的，最后谈到了磋商的可能结果，所以本文主要讨论的是关于贫困儿童衡量标准的磋商，故[C]为正确答案。本文讨论的是英国而非全世界的贫穷儿童，故排除[A]“世界贫穷儿童”；[B]“贫困儿童的多维指标”和[D]“政府关于贫困儿童的政策”分别在文章第五段和第八段提及，但都只是本文讨论的一个方面，而非主题，所以均可排除。
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